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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24717595">The Revenant</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Falcolmreynolds/pseuds/Falcolmreynolds'>Falcolmreynolds</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Body Horror, Gen, Horror, Short Story, Spooky, the revenant - Freeform, yes i had just read his face all red again why do you ask</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 01:00:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,659</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24717595</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Falcolmreynolds/pseuds/Falcolmreynolds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Revenant</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="post_body">
  <p>I was seventeen when I first lost a sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. I was up watching over them, as I always did, every year, since I’d been twelve and old enough to lift the oversized shepherd’s crook my father gave me.</p>
  <p>I didn’t see it happen; all I found the following morning was blood and fleece, leftover from the attack. I hadn’t heard it in the night. It was spattered over the rocks at the forest’s edge; one of the sheep had wandered off, all the way there, and been taken, presumably by a wolf.</p>
  <p>This wasn’t how wolves hunted. I stayed up late and made sure the sheep were within my sight the next few nights.</p>
  <p>That was it. I kept a closer eye over them that year, and lost none others. My father didn’t seem too displeased; “it happens,” he told me. “Don’t let it happen again.”</p>
  <p>When I was eighteen, I lost four sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. I was not careful enough, not clever enough, and every morning I found their blood and their fleece scattered over the edges of the trees. Flung into the branches, blood spattered over the trunks.</p>
  <p>I asked for help. I asked for someone to hunt the beast. But no one else came up here, to the high pastures, because they were haunted.</p>
  <p>My father was displeased. But he couldn’t afford someone else to watch over them; he couldn’t pay a hunter to search the alpine slopes for a lone wolf, and he couldn’t pay a stonemason and his apprentices to build a fence that would stop the wilds for coming for his flock. So he had to settle for me, alone, with a shepherd’s crook still too large for my hands and an oil lantern that sputtered when I swung it too hard out towards the dark.</p>
  <p>There were sounds in the hills. I told myself it was the wolf, out there, somewhere. It had to be. A wolf, alone, screaming in the night.</p>
  <p>When I was nineteen, I lost six sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. My father did not notice. Five people went missing from the tiny village nestled between the sheer shale slopes, and the town huddled in on itself. I only knew because a messenger came to tell me, far up in the mountains, that my father wanted me to stay there, for it was too dangerous to return to the valley.</p>
  <p>“But,” I said to the messenger, “there is a wolf up here.”</p>
  <p>“There’s worse down there,” she said, and nothing else. She watched me carefully, through the corners of her eyes. She knew who I was. She knew of my past. She was frightened of me. She knew I was bad luck.</p>
  <p>Two nights after that, I lost three sheep in one attack.</p>
  <p>The messenger did not return. I gathered the remainder of the flock and tried to keep them safe, hidden from the wolf. But you can’t escape the eyes in the dark, the nose of a wolf, not alone in the mountains. That is its home, and you are a trespasser, no matter how long you’ve been there.</p>
  <p>I lost two more sheep. I had no choice. I had to find the wolf myself, and kill it, or it would devour my father’s livelihood, piece by piece.</p>
  <p>What worried me most was their behaviour. Sheep did not wander off. They followed their leader. They followed their bellweather. But she was here; the head of their flock, every night. I kept her near me, to ensure she would not lose any. And still they vanished. Something had to lure it away, without scaring the rest of the flock.</p>
  <p>This was not a wolf. I did not know what it was, but it was far too intelligent and long-lived to be a single beast, flesh and blood and teeth.</p>
  <p>I waited. I waited, putting out the lanterns, and tried to see what was devouring my beasts. It did not come while I watched.</p>
  <p>The messenger came again. Three more people had gone missing from the town. Two bodies had been found, skulls caved in. She did not look at me as she spoke. She kept her eyes down, and stayed several paces away from me.</p>
  <p>I did not make her stay.</p>
  <p>This was not the hunger of an animal. This was wanting, hunger, but not for only the warm blood of my father’s flock.</p>
  <p>This, the knowledge of what they were finding, frightened me more than a wolf ever could.</p>
  <p>It never came while I was watching. The creature. But it stole three more sheep away in the night, under my watch; once, I even chased after a shape in the dark, to find a dead trail, and when I returned to the flock I found another one of them missing.</p>
  <p>The messenger came back one third time, to tell me my father had vanished, with three others. Four were found, all killed the same way, crushed. Faces battered, bones broken. Beaten to death by stones that were not found near them, that were not found anywhere.</p>
  <p>I returned to the flock, and wrapped myself in my cloak, and gripped the crook in my hands until I couldn’t feel my fingertips on the smooth wood.</p>
  <p>No one else pastured their sheep up here, in the high valleys. No one was willing to do so; these places were sacred, and evil, and haunted. All of these, and more, and I, already cursed, was the only one would could walk this desecrated ground, because I could do no more harm to it - but more importantly, it could do no more harm to me.</p>
  <p>The spire-spines of the mountains could not tear me apart. The unhallowed wilds held no sway over me; I, a tainted soul, could not be pulled away from truth, from good. I have already fallen, and will never be able to rise. The closest I can get was to stand on the peaks.</p>
  <p>When I was fourteen, I killed my only friend in a narrow valley, scree-rock slopes and precariously balanced boulders on the slipping mudstone. He fell, into the ravine, and could not escape, for the sides were too slippery.</p>
  <p>He was not friendly, but he was all I had. He gave me marks of his affection - bruises on my arms, shoulders, sometimes on my face. But it was only ever in good fun.</p>
  <p>In the ravine, he begged me for help. He said to go and fetch a rope, and his father, who would pull him out. Instead I walked along the edge and pushed the rocks in, one by one, and eventually he could not dodge them swiftly enough, and they broke him to pieces and buried him.</p>
  <p>I told the village he had disappeared. I told them he had fallen into the stones and vanished. They found him, and they never forgave me.</p>
  <p>There are no wolves up in the mountains this high, up at the summer pasture. Even they fear to tread the unhallowed ground. They do not walk this grass; only the sheep are dumb enough to follow me up past the watching-stones that guard the path.</p>
  <p>These places are haunted, and so am I.</p>
  <p>I waited until I could see him. He had always been able to play tricks on people, stealing things from them, setting little traps. When he appeared, at the edge of the woods, I said nothing, and waited.</p>
  <p>He touched a sheep, and it followed him away from the flock, to the edge of the trees. He ripped it to pieces with his hands - fingers like claws, stronger than any beast, tore the legs from the body and hurled them into the trees. He shoved the flesh down his throat, and he had to move his jaw with one hand, for his skull was too broken and misshapen for him to close his mouth without it.</p>
  <p>When he had finished shoving fistfuls of raw, bloodied mutton down his throat, he let his jaw hang slack again from his lumpy head, points of bone poking through the gray skin - falling open all the way, so I could see where his tongue hung limp and dry, and his teeth gleamed slick with blood in the moonlight - and used both hands to haul the corpse away into the trees.</p>
  <p>It is vengeance that he seeks, a repayment in blood, but not the blood of the animals. It is mine he wants, mine he needs. He cannot rest while I walk. Where he steps, the grass crumbles to dust, like the dust that coats his hair, rests on his glazed eyes.</p>
  <p>If I do not follow him into the woods, he will break my father’s skull to pieces, and take those from the village until they are all gone and only I remain, alone. Either I will join him, or he will leave me but take everyone else. As if I am not already alone because of him.</p>
  <p>I have driven the sheep down towards the valley. They will go, as I have sent them; this pasture is no longer safe. It is too cursed for them, as dumb as they are. It holds only death.</p>
  <p>As it does for me. I have left my father’s shepherd’s crook planted between the watching-stones as a warning. Do not follow. Do not come this way.</p>
  <p>There is nothing for you here. There is nothing for anyone here.</p>
  <p>I go back up to the pasture, to the tiny wooden hut where I would sleep, and I blow the oil lantern out, and leave it on the window-sill, next to the glass, and I close the door and make sure it will not blow open, and I turn, and I follow him into the dark.</p>
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